The Lake of Lost Girls

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, emotional abuse, and sexual harassment.

The Lake of Lost Girls incorporates elements of three distinct but related genres, each resonating with different key scenes. At the surface level, the book honors cold-case mystery conventions: a set of disappearances from 1998, a skeletal discovery 24 years later, and a modern amateur sleuth (Lindsey) piecing together redacted police files. Readers who enjoy the calibrated clue-gathering of traditional whodunits can thus tick off hallmarks such as a belated autopsy, altered alibis, and a long-suppressed eyewitness account. Yet Greene overlays that scaffolding with the accelerated tempo of a psychological thriller. Ryan’s outbursts of temper, Daisy’s panic when her student ID is traced to crime scenes, and the repeated use of cliff-hanger phone calls push the pacing closer to modern bestsellers like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, in which dread stems as much from uncertainty regarding the characters’ shifting motivations as from external peril.

The text also owes much to domestic noir, a subgenre that gained prominence with works such as Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Domestic noir pivots on the realization that ordinary homes can incubate extraordinary violence, and Greene literalizes that thesis by placing Jess’s body under a family boat and by revealing her father as a murderer who claims he acted out of twisted love.